The idea of devoting a special issue to the question of future time reference in English began with the seminar we jointly convened on ‘What Future for the Future Tense in English?’ for the ESSE-8 conference held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, between 29 August and 2 September 2006. This in turn raises the question as to why we should have thought of future time reference in English as a topic of interest in the first place. We had in fact both been interested in questions relating to tense, aspect and modality for several years, and we had long been struck by the fact that (much to the despair of many non-native speakers) English is particularly well endowed with ways of expressing future time reference by comparison with many other European languages.